Why Brands Prefer Bringing their TV Ads Online

Online video accounted for over half of internet traffic in 2011, and the runaway momentum of web video continues to grow with the introduction of less expensive tablets like the Nexus 7 and larger phone screens such as the Samsung Galaxy 3. There’s reason to believe that both the smartphone market and the tablet market will continue to grow with extraordinary momentum as people shift their consumption patterns away from the desktop, especially outside the US. According to Gigaom by 2016, the world will be watching 833 days of video every single second.

In August alone, market research firm comScore found that 188 million Americans watched video online. The figure represents an all-time high, and these users accessed 37.7 billion videos.

Americans also saw 9.5 billion video ads in the month. So video, which is clearly a popular medium for content will also be a popular medium for advertising. It will be the shot in the arm that the advertising business sorely needs.

The ability to air their TV spots online is a boon for brands like Samsung and even Nokia, whose web videos have gone viral. As well as hoping for ads to go viral, brands are also happy to pay for users to see their TV Ads. This will allow brands to do what they have always wanted to do: integrated marketing campaigns that reinforce the same messages in multiple channels. That’s the only way to get attention in the current noisy environment.

At ZEDO, our publishers are seeing substantially higher eCPMS from video ads, and that’s just the beginning. The completion rate for video ads is much higher than the click-through rate for banners, which now looks stale by comparison.

We think video ads, especially full-screen video, will soon be as effective for brands as TV spots. In fact, over the summer Dell ran a campaign that we watched very closely, because it was the first of its kind. In the campaign, Dell delivered :15 and :30 second spots cross-platform to consumers on connected TVs and mobile devices. The ads linked to Dell’s rich media mobile site. Group M and Joule, WPP’s mobile agency, reported a 68% lift in the time consumers spent on the Dell mobile site if they had seen the ads on more than one device.

One reason this hasn’t happened earlier has been the difficulty of re-compiling video ads for the multitude of mobile operating systems and devices being marketed today, but that problem has largely been solved. Now advertisers can upload their TV spots once to every mobile device.

You can imagine how much this means for brands who have budgetary, logistical and time constraints on video ad production. If you can produce your ad once and take it to several platforms, clearly there’s an incentive --both a marketing and a budgetary incentive -- to do so.

iMedia Communications, Inc. is a trade publisher and event producer serving interactive media and marketing industries. The company was founded in September of 2001 and is a subsidiary of Comexposium USA.
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